Category Archives: IT

I have recently been involved with a project whereby we wanted to use Microsoft Azure to host an application, and for users of this application to be able to login using their local Windows login details and for their permissions to be synced with Active Directory. To achieve this we identified that we could make use of Microsoft Azure Active Directory (online) synced with our local Active Directory on our network.

If, like me, you’ve poured through different resources trying to really understand FIPS 140-2 and what is required to achieve this standard then this article should hopefully give you the answers and links to more information.

Due to my experience with the Twitter API through my implementation of ThinkTwit, I’ve had a few questions lately on how to implement the Twitter (Search) API in Python so rather than answer people individually I figured it would be best to share with everyone on my blog.

I’ve recently been through, and unfortunately failed, the BCSCITP assessment process. For those that don’t know the BCS is the Chartered Institute for IT and the Chartered IT Professional status is equivalent to the chartered status in accounting, but for IT. There are a number of benefits that CITP status gives you, but mostly it is the recognition that comes with the title.

Whilst I was on this journey I couldn’t find a great deal about it online (not really great given they are trying to expand knowledge about it in the IT profession) which made things considerably difficult for me – I am the sort of person who needs a lot of information about a subject to really tackle it; this is, in some ways I guess, contradictory to the attributes of a Chartered IT Professional I guess but it’s just in my nature. I wanted to blog about my experience for others to understand it better but also to remind myself when I try again.

You may or may not know that I’m the developer of a Twitter plugin for WordPress, called ThinkTwit – this very easily allows you to add your tweets to your blog, which can make it very easy for someone to see your thoughts in one place and is also a great marketing tool to have on your corporate website. There are hundreds of tools out there that do this, but few are as flexible as mine.

Not many people are aware of ThinkTwit, and those that do find it could easily think that it’s just for developers, so I thought I’d post a blog on how to use it to show how easy it is to use – and generally to help people who want a quality, reliable tool that is easy to install now but can be very easily expanded further down the line.

A problem that I recently came across is when opening a new Internet Explorer instance in C# the user was being required to login to a site that they had already logged in to. It was pretty clear that this was because the existing session was not being used as a new IE process was being started, therefore I surmised that the solution was to utilise the existing process.

I had read previously about the Navigate2 API and thought it may help but it wasn’t entirely clear how to use it and specifically how to use it on an existing IE instance, so I feel this blog may help others.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time lately on trying to solve this issue and came across many, many barriers, so I thought I’d share with you my findings and the solution that I used. Whilst Word 2007 SP2 (or Word 2007 using the Save As PDF Add-in) and above natively support saving documents as PDF (and can therefore be used by C# to save as if saving a normal .doc or .docx – you can do this easily by adapting my code) below this level it is not possible. There are a few different ways that this problem can be solved (notably, using a paid library or a web service) but most involve payment and some involve methods that, in my case, were not acceptable (e.g. having to install additional software or having to access locations that were locked down).

On a project I was recently working on it was necessary to open a URL in Internet Explorer (a requirement of it to work correctly, unfortunately) and we had a few “bugs” which seemed to randomly occurred. It turned out this was due to Process.Start(“iexplore.exe”) loading 32-bit IE whereas it seems we required 64-bit.

I’ve recently had an experience of setting up Single Sign On (SSO) for an application that we sell in work (Oracle RightNow) which provides a SAML 2.0 interface for authentication and found that there is very little, useful instructions on how to install and especially to configure SAML – hopefully this information will help anyone else in a similar situation.